Inside ‘Black Mirror’s’ First Porn Episode: ‘It’s a Sexual Playground’

On June 5, Netflix will debut the fifth season of its acclaimed dystopian series Black Mirror. And the first of its three episodes, titled “Striking Vipers,” boldly goes where no Black Mirror episode has gone before: the world of porn.

Although, in true Black Mirror fashion, not in the way you’d think.

[Warning: Some Spoilers]

Directed by Owen Harris, who helmed the stellar Black Mirror episodes “Be Right Back” and “San Junipero,” the action centers on Danny (Anthony Mackie) and Karl (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), two best friends who dedicate their early twenties to chasing women, smoking weed, and spending hours in front of the TV playing Striking Vipers, a fighting game reminiscent of Street Fighter.  

Cut to 11 years later. Danny is a paragon of middle-class success—working a high-paying office job for a large conglomerate and married to the lovely Theo (Nicole Beharie), with whom he has a young son. But Danny is unhappy, sapped of the excitement of sexual possibility that guided his earlier years. At his 37th birthday, he’s treated to a surprise guest: Karl. The two had fallen out of touch, but Karl, a womanizing bachelor who runs a record label, is keen to strengthen their friendship. And he comes bearing a gift: Striking Vipers X, the newest edition of the video game they once loved—albeit tricked out with VR capabilities that allow its players to fully inhabit their characters, experiencing the action and feeling every sensation of the fight from their perspective.

So, from their respective domiciles, they begin to play each other—with Danny as the ripped, Ryu-esque male fighter (Ludi Lin) and Karl as the stunning female one (Pom Klementieff) reminiscent of Chun-Li. But before you can say hadouken, their characters are on top of each other, engaging in sex more uninhibited and arousing than either pal has experienced in years.

“[Danny] treats it like a holiday romance in the start and he’s behaving like it’s not real—and on one level, it isn’t real,” co-creator Charlie Brooker tells The Daily Beast.

Brooker, who’s penned nearly every episode of Black Mirror, claims that “Striking Vipers” wasn’t inspired by Gamergate and the bizarre strain of toxic masculinity that’s run rampant in the gaming community but rather the “homoerotic nature” of fighting games like Tekken.

“One of the starting points was, I had been struck before by the slightly homoerotic nature of those fighting games,” explains Brooker. “I loved Tekken and used to play Tekken religiously in the ’90s—myself and a flatmate used to play it all the time, we’d have miniature tournaments, etc. And I realized one day that our neighbors, because we lived in a small flat in London, the people who lived above us and below us must have thought there was an S&M dungeon operating where we were living, because constantly the air was filled with us screaming, UGH! YES! NO! all day and night.”

“I find it a fascinating one, because I still don’t know where I come down on it,” Brooker continues. “Is it a homosexual relationship? In some ways it is, and in others it absolutely isn’t. It’s really about male friendship and the issues that men may have communicating with each other. I wasn’t sitting down going, this is about Gamergate, but it’ll be interesting to see how it’s received by the gaming community.”

Danny and Karl soon become addicted to their in-game trysts. Danny stops sleeping with Theo and harbors guilt over his clandestine online sexual relationship, while Karl struggles to maintain an erection with women outside the game. At one point, Karl becomes so immersed in Striking Vipers X’s VR sex that he even has sex with another person’s polar bear character—which, shockingly, fails to match the highs of sex with Danny’s CG fella.

“That’s a sequel to the ‘National Anthem’ episode,” cracks Brooker.

As for whether the rather phallic title of the episode, “Striking Vipers,” is a euphemism, well, sort of. “I was looking for a title that sounded like a game. There is a bit of a snake reference in there,” he says, chuckling. “But it’s a sexual playground, isn’t it? I mean, if you can fuck a polar bear… I don’t want to get too much into the logistics of it, but you’d probably need a stool to stand on or something, and a really good bedside polar bear manner.”

Rather than Gamergate or the homoeroticism of fighting games, Black Mirror co-creator Annabel Jones maintains that “Striking Vipers” was more about porn and how the brave new world of VR porn could affect people’s offline relationships.

“It’s about the exploration of porn in a world where porn is so sophisticated and can be tailored to your own personal preferences, and so it would increasingly become immersive, and at what point does porn stop being a healthy distraction and actually becomes like you’re having an affair, or cheating on your partner?” asks Jones.

“Anthony Mackie’s character is quite happily in denial in the beginning, where he gets this high he hasn’t experienced for so long—this unique experience of usefulness, and sexuality, and virility, and he’s just ecstatic by it—that he refuses to believe he’s cheating on his wife,” she says. “But then we ultimately see that he’s neglecting her and losing himself to this other world, so it’s that Black Mirror question of how much control we have over our life and how much we’re prepared to be lured by technology, and how much it threatens our relationships.”

Brooker agrees: “It is much more about pornography, and we realized that we hadn’t done an episode that was specifically about that. But it’s also an infidelity story, so it felt like that was a good, roundabout way of getting into the subject of porn.”

As for the question of exactly when VR porn may become hazardous to one’s personal well-being, Brooker thinks he has an idea.

“Of course, the answer to the question of when does porn become an unhealthy threat to your relationship is the point where you fuck a polar bear!” he exclaims. “If you’re doing that, you have a pretty serious problem.”